The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns in India have disrupted daily life, resulting in limited face-to-face interactions with social circles. WhatsApp and Telegram have emerged as digital platforms for discussions amongst the middle-class residents in gated communities in southern India. Illness narratives serve as prompts for building social connections beyond daily interactions in these discussions. These narratives are in the form of memes and fall into two categories: those that end with death or successful recovery. The social commentary within these narratives expresses frustration with the healthcare system’s limited access to resources, the high cost of private healthcare, and government inefficiency.
The narratives associated with recovery featured traditional medicines and home remedies consisting of everyday ingredients used in cooking, namely turmeric, cumin, and ginger. This prompted forwarded messages and memes about immunity boosters. They rarely featured ‘Allopathic’ medicines. However, these were often referred to in the death-oriented narratives through sarcasm. The middle class criticized the lack of insurance coverage for Covid patients, revealing concerns about profit-driven healthcare systems. The discourse surrounding traditional Indian medicine and immunity boosters reflects individual efforts to combat the pandemic while expressing a preference for home remedies and apprehension about allopathic healthcare, often couched in nationalistic rhetoric.
Thus, this paper examines how illness narratives on social media in the form of memes offer a way for communities to discuss the pandemic and its impact on society while also showing their process of building resilience.
